The Iraqi military and police forces had
been so thoroughly pillaged by their own corrupt leadership that they
all but collapsed this spring in the face of the advancing militants of
the Islamic State — despite roughly $25 billion worth of U.S. training
and equipment over the past 10 years and far more from the Iraqi
treasury.

Now maybe if there had been work on the political solution -- the one US
President Barack Obama has spent months giving lip service to --
corruption could have been dealt with.

The U.S.
military has decided against rebuilding the entire Iraqi army and will
instead focus on training a handful of brigades to take on Islamic
radicals, initiating a shift in the Pentagon's decade-long approach to
the handling the country.

'The
idea is, at least in the first instance, to try and build a kind of
leaner, meaner Iraqi army,' a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post.

Officials
who spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity said the military
plans to create nine new Iraqi army brigades of up to 45,000
light-infantry soldiers over the course of the next two months and team
them with other Kurdish and Shiite fighters.

So the problem is being labeled as "corruption" and the US government
thinks the way to handle/address that is to just make smaller units?

That 'solution' -- laughable as it is -- certainly makes more sense than the Iraqi government's response.

Michael Gregory (Reuters) reports
that Minister of Finance Hoshyar Zebari has stated that the military
will take up about 23% of the proposed budget for 2015 and he's also
calling "for deep-rooted reforms to stamp out corruption in a
military that collapsed in the face of an Islamic State advance."

Yes, by all means, put nearly a quarter of your annual budget into a military machine known for its corruption.

Don't root out the corruption, just toss more money at it.

A quarter of your budget, for example.

Since the US isn't planning on any major actions until at least
February, there's nore than enough time to address graft in the Iraqi
military.

In fact, doing so would expose a mountain of corruption because as
members of this political party or slate go down, you can rest assured
they will take others down with them. Meaning? A State of Law military
official goes down for corruption, they'll rat out someone in the
Ministry of Transportation and so on and so on.

In relation to Iraq, the report found rampant corruption as well, with
corrupt government officials operating with impunity. It cited a recent
study by the Bertelsmann Foundation stating that in Iraq “non-security
institutions remain weak and debilitated. The Iraqi leadership faces
many structural constraints on governance, such as a massive brain
drain, a high level of political division, and extreme poverty.”

Corruption is pervasive at all levels of government. There are
widespread reports of demands by officials for bribes, mismanagement of
public funds, payments to “ghost” employees, salary skimming, and
nepotism. Although judicial independence is guaranteed in the
constitution, judges are subject to immense political and sectarian
pressure and are viewed by the public as corrupt or ineffective.
Property rights are not well protected.

Corruption remains a salient feature of the political and economic
landscape of Iraq and poses and threatens its full economic and social
development. Mitigating corruption’s corrosive effects on Iraq’s
reconstruction requires continued USG engagement – both in terms of
programs and in terms of bringing political and diplomatic pressure to
bear on Iraqi leaders.

And as Patrick Cockburn (at the Independent) pointed out last year, the corruption was predicted at the start of the Iraq War:A few months before the invasion, an Iraqi civil servant secretly
interviewed in Baghdad made a gloomy forecast. “The exiled Iraqis are
the exact replica of those who currently govern us… with the sole
difference that the latter are already satiated since they have been
robbing us for the past 30 years,” he said. “Those who accompany the US
troops will be ravenous.”Many of the Iraqis who came back to Iraq
after the US-led invasion were people of high principle who had
sacrificed much as opponents of Saddam Hussein. But fast forward 10
years and the prediction of the unnamed civil servant about the rapacity
of Iraq’s new governors turns out to have been all too true. As one
former minister puts it, “the Iraqi government is an institutionalised
kleptocracy”.

Cockburn spent the last years worshipping the Shi'ites and spitting on
the Sunnis so it's really hard for him to name names when covering the
continued disintegration of Iraq.

But there are names to be named.

Chief among them Nouri al-Maliki.

In 2006, the White House demanded Nouri al-Maliki be named prime
minister (the Iraqi Parliament wanted Ibraham al-Jafaari). In 2010, the
White House demanded Nouri get a second term and, having lost the
election, the White House offered a legal contract (The Erbil Agreement)
to give Nouri a second term.

This despite Nouri insisting he would take on corruption -- repeatedly
insisting. But it's kind of hard to do that when you're part of the
corruption. Pennies found in sofa cushions don't buy all the sports
cars Nouri's son zips around London in nor did they buy the swank home.